Director's Letter

Greetings!

Currently 962 people have registered from 41 countries, with 1/3 of the registrants from outside the USA. There will be more than 100 presentations on NEES projects and accomplishments. Plus, the NEES Quake Summit technical program committee in collaboration with the 10NCEE technical program committee has assembled a terrific agenda for NEES Day at the 10NCEE, Thursday, July 24.

On July 25, following the conclusion of the 10NCEE, for the 5th year in a row, thirty-three Chinese researchers and thirty-one earthquake engineers from the USA will convene to discuss the outcomes of the five-year collaboration and explore future avenues for the collaboration.

The workshop is entitled "5th Workshop on China-USA Collaboration for Disaster Evolution/Resilience of Civil Infrastructure and Urban Environment." Dr. Ru Jiping from NSF China and Dr. Joy M. Pauschke from NSF USA will be in attendance.

If you have not registered for Quake Summit and 10NCEE, we urge you to do so before group-rate hotel rooms are filled. The 10NCEE website has information discounted on hotels and airfare.

Thank you!

Julio Ramirez
NEES Chief Officer and NEEScomm Center Director

Final NEES data curation workshop a success

Last month, NEES data curator Standa Pejša, along with Purdue University doctoral engineering candidate Cheng Song, conducted a two-day curation-training workshop at UC Davis. Twenty researchers from over 10 research projects learned fundamentals of data archiving in the NEES data repository and about the new developments in the area of data publications in the NEEShub.

The UC Davis staff and residing researchers created a very friendly and welcoming atmosphere that contributed to the success of the training. The curation team at Purdue has already started reviewing the experiments that were being uploaded during the training, so that the data are properly archived before the expiration of the current NEES Operations award. Thanks to Jenny Chen for the group photo. Click for a larger view.

NEES Outstanding Contributor Awards at Quake Summit

At the Quake Summit meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, NEEScomm again will present the annual Outstanding Contributor Awards to recognize exceptional NEES service and impacts. Winners will be selected for their contributions in the following 6 categories:

Education, Outreach and Training

Site Operations and Research Support

Influential NEES Projects

NEES IT Tools and Resources

Project Curation

Student Contribution

Details about award criteria will be included with the formal award solicitations. Stay tuned!

Ken Elwood is New Chair of EERI Learning from Earthquakes Committee

Ken Elwood, a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia and a member of the NEES Governance Board, has accepted a three-year term as chair of the EERI Learning From Earthquakes (LFE) Advisory Committee. The LFE program, initiated in 1973 by EERI and funded primarily by NSF, sends out multi-disciplinary teams of researchers to investigate and learn from the damaging effects of earthquakes. Elwood is an active member of the earthquake engineering research community and has been serving as interim chair since December 2013.

Read more about Elwood and the Learning from Earthquakes program at the EERI website.

Liel and Deierlein to receive Spectra Outstanding Paper Award

For their paper Using Collapse Risk Assessments to inform Seismic Safety Policy for Older Concrete Buildings, professors Abbie Liel and Greg Deierlein have won the prestigious Spectra Outstanding Paper Award. The paper was selected by the Spectra editorial board and the EERI Honors Committee. Among its praises, the selection committee commends the paper for being “exemplary of the promise of performance-based earthquake engineering for informing decision-making regarding seismic safety."

Liel and Deierlein will receive the award at the 2014 10NCEE meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. Read more about the paper and the award recipients at the EERI website.

NEES@Nevada shake testing in full swing

Since the opening of its new, larger facility, NEES at Nevada’s Large Scale Structures Laboratory has been conducting tests back-to-back.

In April, PIs Keri Ryan and Justin Marshall conducted shake tests to validate the effectiveness of a new gap damper scheme. The special gap damper is designed to limit excessive deformation of a base isolation system without causing impact against a hard stop and the associated high frequency motions and accelerations. The study, An Innovative Gap Damper to Control Seismic Isolator Displacements in Extreme Earthquakes, will result in an experimentally and analytically validated framework for reliable, performance-based isolator design for buildings under different seismic scenarios. In the photo (above), the top image shows the 3-story base-isolated building frame with gap damper system. The bottom image shows the key components of the gap damper, a bumper attached to 4 viscous dampers. (Click for a larger view.) Find details on the gap damper project on the NEES at UNR website.

Over the past two months, PI Saiid Saiidi has tested seven bridge columns for his NSF-funded project on Sustainable Highway Bridges with Novel Materials and Deconstructible Components. In this study, his latest work in shape memory alloys, Saiidi is investigating his newly developed superelastic copper-aluminum-manganese alloy bars combined with engineered cementitious composites (ECC) in addition to nickel-titanium alloy bars combined with rubber. Saiidi and his team shook the bridge columns with earthquakes of different intensities of up to 250% of design earthquake -- to discover how well the new design and reassembly process works in resisting earthquakes while minimizing permanent tilt and damage in bridges. The image above shows a column prepped for testing. (Click for a larger view.) Successful columns will be incorporated in a quarter-scale, two-span bridge model Saiidi will test on shake tables later this summer. Read more about the project on Professor Saiidi's website.

Slated for July at UNR, PI John Stanton from the University of Washington will test a quarter-scale, two-span bridge for the project Seismic Resilience of Pre-Tensioned Bridge Bents. This study aims to achieve three major advances in the design and construction of bridge bents: improved seismic performance, faster on-site construction, and better long-term durability.

NEES research inspires high-achieving New York teen

Research by Iowa State Professor Sri Sritharan inspired energetic New York high school student Maria Walsh-Regotti to delve into earthquake engineering. After reading one of Professor Sritharan’s papers on testing scaled models of structures and foundations, she was hooked. “I was really interested in earthquake research and everything he was doing,” she said.

Sritharan connected Maria with his doctoral student Brad Fleming, who helped Maria develop her own models. Maria even traveled to the Iowa State campus, where she experienced a real research laboratory and learned to use NEES cyberfrastructure-based tools.

“I read many, many research papers on soil compaction and soil improvement,” Walsh-Regotti said. “I definitely learned so much more being at the university and from all the contact we had in between.”

With her NEES-informed scaled models, Maria has gone on to win multiple engineering competitions: first place in the 2013 Westchester Science and Engineering Fair and the 2013 ASM International Foundation award; second place in the 2014 Winchester Rockland Subregional Junior Science and Humanities Symposium; and fourth place in the 2014 Westchester Science and Engineering Fair.

“Although she wasn’t familiar with all of the scale similitudes and boundary conditions, it was remarkable that what she was demonstrating was conceptually similar to the NEES research,” Sritharan said.

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The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded organization of which the goals are part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program's (NEHRP) coordinated effort to address earthquake risk in the United States. The NEES mission to accelerate improvements in seismic design and performance by serving as an indispensable collaboratory for discovery and innovation. Cooperative Agreement CMMI-0927178

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